Page 34 of Nikolay

“You won’t.”

“How do you know?”

She smiled then, small and crooked and very wolf. “Because you smell like us.”

That did something stupid and immediate to my throat.

I looked down the corridor behind me, toward the turn where I’d left Nikolay standing under the lights. Nothing moved there now. No dark shape filled the space. No sound of him coming after me. Just blank white glare and walls that did not care.

Good.

Let him stay there with his explanations.

I looked back at Sloan. “Your brother’s really okay with random upset wolves showing up at his table?”

“He’ll survive the shock.”

I huffed a breath that almost qualified as a laugh.

She reached and squeezed my hand. “Go wash your face if you want. Or don’t. Nobody upstairs’s gonna be weird about it.”

“That is a bold promise in this building.”

Her laugh was light. “Suit yourself.”

The answer came easy, and maybe that was what made me finally move. Not certainty. Just the first suggestion of relief I’d felt since purple light flashed over champagne silk and everything inside me dropped out.

I followed a half step behind, wary still, but pulled harder by the thought of pack than by any caution left in me.

Wolves aren’t meant to be alone.

The sentence moved through me as we went, not soft enough to soothe exactly, but true in that old body-deep way truth sometimes was. Like hunger. Like instinct. Like knowing where north lay even under cloud cover.

I had spent weeks among vampires, witches, and even an angel, teaching myself not to mind the loneliness. And while I didn’t mind being alone, sometimes I longed for the company of wolves.

Now that another wolf had named it, I wasn’t sure I could bear it one minute longer.

The stairwell carried us out of Obsidian’s throat and into one of its quieter lungs. By the time Sloan led me through the guarded entrance to the upper lounge, the music from below had thinned to a pulse under the floorboards, and the air no longer felt sharp with spectacle. It felt expensive still—amber light, velvet, polished lacquer, old liquor—but less like being watched and more like being permitted to breathe.

The VIP lounge spread wide beneath low golden lamps and dark architectural lines, all deep seating and carefully rationed intimacy. Here the power in the room did not announce itself by trying to prove anything. It simply sat where it pleased and expected the world to adjust. A private bar glowed along one wall. Glassware flashed in discreet little signals. Beyond the railing, the main floor lay below in softened shadow, its purple seduction made distant enough to survive.

I followed Sloan past a pair of seated immortals I recognized on sight as the sort who never waited for anybody and a small cluster of witches speaking in murmurs over dark drinks. Nobody stopped us. Nobody looked at me twice once they caught Sloan’s scent on me and saw where she was leading.

The pack sat in the far back corner.

I knew it before I fully saw them. Maybe because wolves occupied space differently than every other species I’d met in this city. Even dressed in expensive clothes and lounging on velvet beneath amber lamps, they did not dissolve into the decor. They made the furniture look temporary. There was an ease to them I felt in my own body, like a remembered stretch after a cramped night’s sleep. Three men. Two women. Half-finished drinks on the low, lacquered table before them. One boot hooked under a bench. One woman leaning into the shoulder of the man beside her without thinking about it. A broad hand draped over the back of the curved seat behind the entire group as if the gesture alone could gather them closer.

Trust had its own posture. They wore it like skin.

I knew the man at the center of them was the alpha before anybody said a word.

He did not need height for that, though he had plenty. He did not need volume. He did not need the others to arrange themselves around him in obvious deference. Authority sat on him the way weather sat on a mountain—native, unargued with, impossible to mistake. He wore a dark suit cut close enough to prove money had been spent on it and then forgotten, because the man himself mattered more than the cloth. Olive skin. Big shoulders. Hair black as fresh ink, cropped close at the sides and left longer on top in a rough, controlled mess that looked as though his fingers found purchase there often. His jaw looked less inherited than carved on purpose—strong and angular—beautiful, although you’d not want to cross him. He was dangerous; there was no question.

His attention lifted before Sloan spoke, landing on us both with a calm steadiness that did not feel like scrutiny so much as assessment already half completed.

I nearly stopped.

Not because he seemed threatening. Because he glanced at me in a way that hit me too fast.